Filling her compact & delicious bodywith chicken páprika, she glanced at metwice.Fainting with interest, I hungered backand only the fact of her husband & four other peoplekept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying'You are the hottest one for years of nightHenry's dazed eyeshave enjoyed, Brilliance.' I advanced upon(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyesdowncast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders isshe sitting on, over there?The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.—Mr. Bones: there is.

I sent him from home hardly more than a child.Years later, he came back loving avocados.In the distant kitchen where he'd flipped burgersand tossed salads, he'd mastered how to prepare

the pear-shaped fruit. He took a knife and pliedhis way into the thick skin with a bravadoand gentleness I'd never seen in him. He nudgedthe halves apart, grabbed a teaspoon and carefully

eased out the heart, holding it as if it were fragile.He took one half, then the other of the armadillo-hided fruit and slid his spoon where flesh edgedagainst skin, working it under and around, sparing

the edible pulp. An artist working at an easel,he filled the center holes with chopped tomatoes.The broken pieces, made whole again, mergedinto two reconstructed hearts, a delicate and rare

surgery. My boy who'd gone away angry and wildhad somehow learned how to unclosewhat had once been shut tight, how to urgeout the stony heart and handle it with care.

Beneath the rind he'd grown as tender and mildas that avocado, its rubies nestled in peridot,our forks slipping into the buttery textureof unfamiliar joy, two halves of what we shared.

I can see her in the kitchen, Cooking up, for the hundredth time, A little something from her Limited Midwestern repertoire. Cigarette going in the ashtray, The red wine pulsing in its glass, A warning light meaning Everything was simmering Just below the steel lid Of her smile, as she boiled The beef into submission, Chopped her way Through the vegetable kingdom With the broken-handled knife I use tonight, feeling her Anger rising from the dark Chambers of the head Of cabbage I slice through, Missing her, wanting To chew things over With my mother again.

In haste one evening while making dinnerI threw away a potato that was spoiledon one end. The rest would have been

redeemable. In the yellow garbage pailit became the consort of coffee grounds,banana skins, carrot peelings.I pitched it onto the compostwhere steaming scraps and leavesreturn, like bodies over time, to earth.

When I flipped the fetid layers with a hayfork to air the pile, the potato turned upunfailingly, as if to revile me—

looking plumper, firmer, resurrectedinstead of disassembling. It seemed to growuntil I might have made shepherd’s piefor a whole hamlet, people who pass the daydropping trees, pumping gas, pinninghand-me-down clothes on the line.